Growing numbers of child gangs in Venezuela are using machetes to compete for “quality” garbage to eat as the country’s economic and humanitarian crisis keeps worsening, according to a report published this week.

The United States announced this week it will provide $2.5 million in aid to Venezuelan refugees who have fled their country to Colombia amid a deepening political and humanitarian crisis in their homeland.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro shared a video of him on Monday rescuing a “disoriented” sloth that had reportedly gotten lost, angering many following the worst humanitarian crisis in the nation’s history. “This story has a happy ending,” Maduro wrote on

Venezuela’s democratically elected National Assembly has outlawed the use of a national cryptocurrency known as the “petro” on Tuesday, describing it as an illegal attempt to mortgage the country’s oil reserves.

Although Venezuela’s problems began with the election of the authoritarian left-wing revolutionary Hugo Chávez in 1998, 2017 was the year that the country’s problems became too catastrophic for even the world’s most ardent socialists to defend.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has gifted officers from the country’s national police force a $5 Christmas bonus, as well as an extended holiday to thank them for their loyalty to his socialist regime.

Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolás Maduro has ruled that the main opposition parties can no longer stand in next year’s presidential election, the latest in a series of anti-democratic moves by his regime.

The health crisis in socialist Venezuela is now reaching apocalyptic proportions as hospitals and pharmacies have just a fraction of the medicine and resources required to give people adequate medical treatment.